Recently, an image forming apparatus that employs liquid ejection method is available as a printer, a facsimile machine, a copier, a plotter, or a multi-functional apparatus having multiple functions thereof. Such image forming apparatus may include a recording head and an electrostatic-absorption belt. The recording head dispenses ink onto a recording sheet to form an image on the recording sheet. The electrostatic-absorption belt conveys the recording sheet.
Such sheet may include a medium made of material such as paper, string, fiber, cloth, leather, metal, plastic, glass, timber, and ceramic, for example. Further, “image formation” used herein refers to providing, recording, printing, or imaging an image, a letter, a figure, and a pattern to a sheet. Moreover, “liquid” used herein is not limited to recording liquid or ink, but may include anything discharged in the form of fluid. Hereinafter, the recording liquid may be referred to as ink for the simplicity of description.
In such image forming apparatus, when the ink are ejected onto a recording sheet, so called “cockling” may occur. Cockling of the recording sheet tends to cause the recording sheet to bend in an uncontrolled manner downward away from the recording head and upward toward the recording head. It is important to avoid an occurrence of cockling to maintain an image quality by preventing a carriage from contacting the recording sheet.
An image forming apparatus employs a mechanism to adjust a distance between a carriage and a recording sheet to have a space therebetween. However, if a cockling phenomenon occurs, it is difficult to recover a positioning error of the ink dispensed onto the recording sheet. Consequently, a quality of an image decreases.